Adapting a real-life tragedy into a movie isn’t easy. Just ask any screenwriter, who has to establish all the characters in the first act, then plunge them into disaster in the second, while finding a way to foreshadow the danger without using repetitive dialogue like, “Hey guys, you going to get back home before that storm hits?” or “I dunno, guys, I hear the weather could be pretty bad.”
“Not Without Hope” tells a real-life tale of survival which took the lives of three people, two of them NFL football players, while they were clinging to a capsized boat off the coast of Florida, in the middle of a storm. It’s a terrible story with unthinkable consequences. There are moments when director and co-writer Joe Carnahan explores these people and their plight with rich characterization and novel filmmaking techniques. But it’s also a heavy-handed disaster movie, undone by clunky exposition and a lead performance from Zachary Levi, in which he never feels completely present.
Levi plays Nick Schuyler, who joins three friends on a fishing trip to — as we are told time and time again — a secret fishing location, known only to real-life NFL linebacker Marquis Cooper (Quentin Plair, “Chad Powers”). They’re joined by their friends Will Bleakley (Marshall Cook) and NFL defensive end Corey Smith (Terrence Terrell), and they’re quickly caught up in a hurricane. Also their anchor is stuck, and as they try to force it loose — because Cooper doesn’t want to lose another anchor — they get hit by a giant wave and the boat turns upside down.
They have no access to their radio, they’re far outside of cell phone range, in a location no one else knows, after telling their families they’ll be home late, so nobody even thinks they’re missing until they’re completely screwed. It’s exceptionally difficult for Carnahan and co-writer E. Nicholas Mariani, adapting a biography by Nick Schuyler and Jeré Longman, to set all that up without making “Not Without Hope” appear contrived. So difficult that they don’t entirely pull it off.
But once the disaster sets in, Carnahan is in his wheelhouse. He keeps his camera low, plunging it into the water like his audience is drowning too. He drops out the audio during big speeches, which the rest of these imperiled men can’t possibly hear, making the final words even sadder. “Not Without Hope” is, ironically, best when it’s completely hopeless. The sense of futility Carnahan maintains is impressive.
And yet we keep cutting away, as U.S. Coast Guard Captain Timothy Close conducts search and rescue operations. Close is played by Josh Duhamel, who learned how to exude authority the hard way, by barking orders at giant toy robots in Michael Bay’s “Transformers” movies. His performance is more convincing here, and he successfully pulls off a mighty feat, making it look like he has a hard job sitting behind a desk while the rest of the cast is pummeled in a water tank somewhere. But then he has a speech where he explains how hypothermia works to other people in the Coast Guard’s search and rescue division, who presumably already know that. It’s useful information for the audience, yes, but “Not Without Hope” couldn’t figure out how to convey it out loud without looking silly in the process.
That’s “Not Without Hope” in a nutshell: a terrifying story, sometimes undone by hackneyed Hollywood fakery. The worst offender is Zachary Levi, whose wide-eyed performance never successfully sells the severity of this situation. The actor can be engaging when he’s supposed to look out of place, staring at the world around him with almost childlike wonder, but he can’t seem to turn that dial all the way off in “Not Without Hope.” At his best he gets away with it, but occasionally he looks like he won the role in a contest and can’t believe his luck, which isn’t the right vibe for a scene where all your best friends are dying in front of you.
Argh, the bag! It be mixed! “Not Without Hope” never completely comes together but when it works, it’s absorbing disaster filmmaking. It’s a shame it doesn’t always work. It’s an even bigger shame that it only half works.
“Not Without Hope” is now playing in theaters.